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A comment on Merchants of Meth: How Big Pharma Keeps the Cooks in Business.

Re:Merchants of Meth: How Big Pharma Keeps the Cooks in Busi... by bediger4000 on Monday September 30, 2013 @10:10PM (#6473617)
Meth use as a whole, according to a 2009 RAND Corporation study, costs the nation anywhere between $16 billion and $48 billion each year.

I call BS. Even $16 billion is totally ridiculous. According to Wikipedia, NASA's budget was $18 billion in 2011.

This article is just a straight ahead Moral Panic, trying to polarize a situation, and then punish some party while there's a big fog of crapaganda around. Mother Jones should be ashamed.

And just a side note: how many Moral Panics over drugs do we have before we just get over it?

I'm old, I can recall a late 60s moral panic about LSD - it supposedly made you have babies with lobster claws, if you survived the mandatory dive out of a 2nd floor window. There was an early 70s panic over heroin, and then the Angel Dust thing in the early 80s. After that, it was Free Basing, and then Crack. It's been Evil Meth for a while now, isn't it about time for a New Drug to Panic over?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Merchants of Meth: How Big Pharma Keeps the Cooks in Busi... by ljd on Monday September 30, 2013 @10:42PM (#6473710)
"I'm old, I can recall a late 60s moral panic about LSD - it supposedly made you have babies with lobster claws, if you survived the mandatory dive out of a 2nd floor window. There was an early 70s panic over heroin, and then the Angel Dust thing in the early 80s. After that, it was Free Basing, and then Crack. It's been Evil Meth for a while now, isn't it about time for a New Drug to Panic over?"

I grew up in a very poor part of the country and this statement is ridiculous. These drugs (save maybe LSD) are still massively destructive forces in society that still kill people today in poor, uneducated sections of the United States. Your statement makes it sound like people are just afraid of these drugs because they don't understand it, but once they come around to it, they'll see how it's not so bad.

That is an insane position on drugs.

disclosure: I'm actually for legalization but I have my eyes open about what they do and how they destroy families and lives.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Merchants of Meth: How Big Pharma Keeps the Cooks in Busi... by bediger4000 on Tuesday October 01, 2013 @01:17PM (#6477553)
Sorry, I wasn't clear. It's not that the drugs are "not so bad", it's just that the fog around something so horribly stigmatized prevents any sensible treatment program.

The only thing society does if there's a major drug Moral Panic is to punish the offenders severely. Putting people in prison just causes huge problems all around, even for those not in prison. We end up with a prison-industrial complex and a militarized police force.

Illegal drugs do indeed destroy families and lives: but prison is almost certainly not any help for those issues. We've got AA for booze, Narcotics Anonymous for heroin, etc etc. Those actually seem to make a difference. The Moral Panics around particular drugs keep us from helping the people involved.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Merchants of Meth: How Big Pharma Keeps the Cooks in Busi... by rurounijones on Monday September 30, 2013 @10:30PM (#6473682)
> I call BS.

I am making no statement of support for original numbers but if you "call BS" then you need to provide something to back you up. NASA budget comparison is pointless.

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Re:Merchants of Meth: How Big Pharma Keeps the Cooks in Busi... by vrish88 on Monday September 30, 2013 @10:29PM (#6473675)
Sources? Mother Jones clearly has theirs, otherwise I would have to accuse you of "trying to polarize a situation".
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Re:Merchants of Meth: How Big Pharma Keeps the Cooks in Busi... by dmckeon on Monday September 30, 2013 @11:45PM (#6473922)
isn't it about time for a New Drug to Panic over?

Here you are, a new X/MDMA, just in time for the end of Q3:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/28/us-usa-drugs-molly...

More seriously, I had thought that meth was over-blown as a danger until I saw a business truck advertising: Mold Specialist / Meth Lab Cleanup then did a Google search for similar companies, and got 200K hits. http://biomethdecon.com/

People choosing to use drugs is one thing, but people exposing their minor children, neighbors, or subsequent tenants to drug, solvent, and feedstock residue is quite another.

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Re:Merchants of Meth: How Big Pharma Keeps the Cooks in Busi... by pstuart on Tuesday October 01, 2013 @12:31PM (#6477204)
That would be "bath salts", which are actually rather scary. Not that they should be illegal, just remove the need by legalizing their herbal counterpart: cannabis.
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